The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
Apologies for the necro, but I wanted to reply here before it got too far past the thread's life.
First off, thank you for weighing in here, you were I think a lot more persuasive than me in responding to the assertions of innocence here.
I think you and I agree on this topic, including about vigilante justice, with the exception that I don't think it corrodes a system if and when that system is already broken. I think it is in this case a negative outcome of exactly that; were our justice system working properly, the UHC CEO would have been jailed or executed for his actions, like you said.
Anyways, I enjoyed the discussions here, and I'm glad you're here too!
>The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
Excessive is knowingly denying someone necessary medical coverage solely for financial gain. If private insurers want to play that game then they can register as a non-profit organization or be an optional layer on top of a public backstop, such as medicare-for-all, an arrangement they've lobbied against for deacdes.
Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion
You know the answer, they would just steal money from people they don't like the pay for everything, and when that runs out almost immediately they'll implement rationing and waitlists. Tale as old as time.
Raising taxes to pay for the public welfare isn't stealing.
Rationing and wait-lists are a problem in some countries, and they're preferable problems to the ones existing in our current system.
You don't want to help, and you need a fairy tale to reframe your selfishness so you can lie to yourself in the mirror. Many such people, you aren't insightful.
They don't have to believe the insured, they can believe the doctors, plural. Also, their "errors", even when innocent, are on you to solve.
I'm currently working to get my 2nd autistic child covered for ABA services, been fighting insurance for 2 months now with 4 qualified professionals, 2 MDs, a PhD Nurse and an ABA Supervisor, from multiple providers saying she qualifies. Insurance's own in-house doctor agreed that they followed state recommendations, up until another internal doctor just some days ago contradicted them and said there's one part that they don't, which just so happens to invalidate her entire diagnosis (which took 3 separate appointments over the course of a month and was more thorough than most). The doctors who diagnosed here are livid, as they have a major insurer essentially telling them that their entire program and every diagnosis from it is invalid, while other programs are not held to the same scrutiny. I know first hand, because her older sister is also autistic and she got approved by this same insurer on a much less stringent examination from a different provider.
We'll get it solved, in the worst case we're fortunate enough to be able to hire lawyers. Not everyone has that kind of savings. Oh, and in the meantime this is 2 months my kid is going without therapy, and a bunch of wasted time for all involved.
You want more?
Earlier this year my father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan denied him coverage for in-patient rehab after brain surgery, which the surgeon, doctor and every medical professional who looked at him said he needed. We appealed, they denied the appeal. Later that week he tried to get up at night to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and fell, suffering a skull fracture that necessitated a second brain surgery. That second surgery was fully covered, but they still refused to cover in-patient rehab. He died some weeks later, have never received more than rehab 2 days a week and whatever improvised rehab the family could cobble together between our work schedules.
And that's just my personal experience in the last year. I have stories from previous years and more still from relatives. Anyone who's had to make extensive use of the medical system will have many such stories of various severity, it's just a given that when you file a claim you must be ready to fight and hope you don't have to. These are not innocent mistakes, and if they are than the insurers making them should be shut down for negligence and those in charge held responsible for resulting damages.
>They don't have to believe the insured, they can believe the doctors, plural. Also, their "errors", even when innocent, are on you to solve.
You misinterpreted what I wrote. I was referring to people who believe they were wronged, but do not have the knowledge to understand they were not wronged, due to healthcare being extremely complicated.
I understand your frustrations, and there certainly are errors that managed care organizations should not be making, but the financial figures indicate the root of the problem is insufficient supply of healthcare.
>For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
There is little to no profit in managed care. There are 7 publicly listed managed care organizations (UNH, Elevance, Cigna, CVS, Humana, Centene, and Molina). There are myriad non profit managed care organizations (Kaiser Permanente, Cambia, HCSC and other various Blue Cross Blue Shield).
All of their financials are open, so go read their 10-K and 990 and see for yourself that almost all the revenue goes out the door as healthcare expenses. It has nothing to do with profit or non profit.
The root problem of insufficient supply of healthcare is not in the wheelhouse of managed care organizations to supply, no matter how many executives are assassinated.
Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities.
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system the insurance companies do it. They have the negotiating power that individual patients do not.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
That's a nice theory. The stock prices of many of these companies seems to disagree.
They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.
These companies have very low profit margins (as a fraction of cash flowing through them). They have strong incentive to keep costs down. What does stock price have to do with this? A high stock price can just mean there's relatively few outstanding shares (you probably mean market cap). The largest health insurer in the US has a share of just 16% so the market is highly competitive.
There is literally an entire cottage industry full of people whose entire livelihood depends on getting people medical treatment after it's been denied.
